New Source Review : What's Old is New

Neither the Bush administration nor its critics grasp what is truly flawed with New Source Review. Its problems are two-fold: it is part and parcel of the larger mistake of grandfathering, and it is defined mostly in terms of the installation of pollution-control equipment. Both of these aspects of New Source Review retard the turnover of polluting capital, locking in obsolete, old facilities such as 80-year-old coal-fired power plants and giving them economic reasons to live well past their original intended retirement date. This capital sluggishness is bad from both an economic and an environmental perspective